The Younger Set eBook

And they sounded sadder and more meaningless now to
him, here in his own room, until the monotony of their
recurrent mockery began to unnerve him.

He turned on the electricity, shrank from it, extinguished
it. And for a long time he sat there in the darkness
of early morning, his unfilled pipe clutched in his
nerveless hand.

CHAPTER II

A DREAM ENDS

To pick up once more and tighten and knot together
the loosened threads which represented the unfinished
record that his race had woven into the social fabric
of the metropolis was merely an automatic matter for
Selwyn.

His own people had always been among the makers of
that fabric. Into part of its vast and intricate
pattern they had woven an inconspicuously honourable
record—­chronicles of births and deaths and
marriages, a plain memorandum of plain living, and
upright dealing with their fellow men.

Some public service of modest nature they had performed,
not seeking it, not shirking; accomplishing it cleanly
when it was intrusted to them.

His forefathers had been, as a rule, professional
men—­physicians and lawyers; his grandfather
died under the walls of Chapultepec Castle while twisting
a tourniquet for a cursing dragoon; an uncle remained
indefinitely at Malvern Hill; an only brother at Montauk
Point having sickened in the trenches before Santiago.

His father’s services as division medical officer
in Sheridan’s cavalry had been, perhaps, no
more devoted, no more loyal than the services of thousands
of officers and troopers; and his reward was a pension
offer, declined. He practised until his wife
died, then retired to his country home, from which
house his daughter Nina was married to Austin Gerard.

Mr. Selwyn, senior, continued to pay his taxes on
his father’s house in Tenth Street, voted in
that district, spent a month every year with the Gerards,
read a Republican morning newspaper, and judiciously
enlarged the family reservation in Greenwood—­whither
he retired, in due time, without other ostentation
than half a column in the Evening Post, which
paper he had, in life, avoided.

The first gun off the Florida Keys sent Selwyn’s
only brother from his law office in hot haste to San
Antonio—­the first etape on his first
and last campaign with Wood’s cavalry.

That same gun interrupted Selwyn’s connection
with Neergard & Co., operators in Long Island real
estate; and, a year later, the captaincy offered him
in a Western volunteer regiment operating on the Island
of Leyte, completed the rupture.

* * * *
*

And now he was back again, a chance career ended,
with option of picking up the severed threads—­his
inheritance at the loom—­and of retying
them, warp and weft, and continuing the pattern according
to the designs of the tufted, tinted pile-yarn, knotted
in by his ancestors before him.